hands of time
by lydiamartins
Summary: book!verse, au; everything emily did was for somebody else; but your clumsy hands are peeling away the layers of cloth and tape she so desperately pasted over and unveiling something ugly, something old -— emilyali friendship, emilyben ; for coppertone wars' twelve days of christmas challenge, level five, part one!


**summary: **everything emily did was for her; but your clumsy hands are peeling away the layers of cloth and tape she so desperately pasted over and unveiling something ugly, something old -— emilyali friendship, emilyben ; for coppertone wars' twelve days of christmas challenge, level five, part one!

**notes | **also, below, when it's talking about how emily's parents weren't that supportive of her when she came out, it's basically about the beginning stages with her mother in the tv series, but this is mostly book!verse, especially when they had sent her away to gay-away camp - it seems as though they were a lot more supportive of emily's decisions in the tv series, though, so if you haven't read the books, that part might seem a little odd;

by the way, the newest book in the pll series _deadly _is being released today - okay;

**hands of time**  
emily fields

.

Sometimes, Emily thinks back to the time when A was just a letter —

(But then again, deep down, Emily Fields is just a child, daddy's little girl, who just wants her best friend back).

Everything was so much simpler back then, and perhaps she felt as though the friendships between her inner circle were a little dependent on Alison, sometimes, a little too dependent, somebody needs to keep them together, keeping them in line; without that control, which evolves into a loose glue, the five of them would have drifted off in separate directions, like they did when Alison's death had been reported. In a way, she had always been the glue to hold them together - when she was alive when they first met, when the text messages from A started coming back (even though A really never was Alison, now was she?), when she came back, for real.

But, Emily doesn't think that it's right to depend on a glue like that - a glue that keeps on coming and going, as though the world around her is going to follow her to the ends of the earth and back (and maybe the world will) but it's not right, it can't be. There should be a way for all of them to be able to be friends without somebody holding them together, but it's not the way that they really function.

If she really thinks about it, the foundation of the friendship was brought together by Ali, and Emily believes that back then, all those years when she was just a little girl who was so fortunate to have those many friends, and the right ones, too, that the only reason the five of them were brought together was because of Alison, not because of the flag, or not because of the treasure hunt, or that they were all meant to be friends - it makes sense that after everything's that happened to Emily so far, she's not a little girl anymore; she doesn't believe in things like destiny and fate, not anymore.

Sometimes, she wishes that she could turn back the hands of time and be young again — young and innocent, when her mother wouldn't give her these strange looks about how her daughter was always going to be different and her father (who had sent her to gay-away camp without a single word given to her until she was free of the 'gay-virus') and how nobody truly understood her, not even now.

Emily likes to think that Spencer and Aria and Hanna all understand her, but they seem to be perfect in their own worlds; Hanna's a normal child (with a not so normal mother and a bitchy stepsister, but nevertheless) and Aria's family has always seem put together well (or maybe, they just hide their secrets better than anybody else - after all, nobody talks badly about the Montgomery family for a reason) and Spencer — well, Emily, thinks, maybe all of her friends have more problems than she does, but it still doesn't make all of her problems go away.

Nevertheless, she's not as good as hiding her problems as her friends seem to be — there's no other reason Emily had always been considered as the weakest link by A, why she had always trusted all the wrong people (and sometimes the right, before completely betraying her trust) but it seems as though she's always been second best, the second choice in everything; her parents want a better child, of course. They deserve something better.

.

When Emily was a child, a normal one who believed in fairytales and such nonsense, her father had come home from the army one day.

She had run up to his arms, and he had spun her around like a princess - he had brought her back a box of Disney movies, ones from around the world, he had told her, and Emily had spent days in her bedroom, curled up in a cocoon under several layers of thick blankets (woolen ones, too, so heavy that she could barely get up without the assistance of the bed frame's rails), but they were warm and felt like home, nonetheless, watching all the movies.

Emily spent days re-watching her favorite scenes, sighing at the princesses and their pretty dresses, and almost got slightly bored when all of their problems seemed to be solved in less than two hours, but then there were movies that were absolutely perfect - she fell in love with the concept of rags to riches stories at the age of five, and it was amazing - _magical, even _- but it couldn't have been possible.

"Mommy, are fairytales really true?" She had asked this question to her mother, munching on a grilled cheese sandwich, and eagerly fidgeting with a new pink swim cap, which matched one of the dresses in her fairytale movie - in a way, Emily couldn't remember which one, but they were all so perfect that it didn't really matter - not at all.

Her mother rolls her eyes, frowning down at Emily, "Emily, you know that fairytales aren't true, right? They're just make-believe, okay?" Her words seem so reassuring and said in this gentle tone, but Emily knows that her mother's lying, because fairytales and happily ever after's, and everything that's right in the world where the bad guy finally gets killed and everybody is happy — it just has to be true, so —

"Yes, mommy, of course I know that," she lies, knowing that any other response would be met with a five-minute lecture. (But all those perfect moments, have to count for _something,_ right?)

.

Sometime, in the middle between bouts of depression and innocent childhood memories, Emily knows that she's different.

In a way, it all started with summer days and mowing lawns and Ben Coogan - who probably wasn't the best first boyfriend that she could have had, but he came from a conservative Christian family, too; their parents respected one another, and become close over the years, the two of them had been good friends for a while, and everybody else on the swim team had already decided for them that the two best swimmers - one male, one female - should always be in a relationship, therefore starting a complete disaster.

Emily never really thought about Ben in that sort of _more than friends _way, but she had always liked him - maybe it was in her personality to be overly flirty, but maybe there was something between them, an unintentional spark which became a flame; usually, she'd perch herself on her dad's broken deck chair (her mother wouldn't buy anything else until her father came home - if he was coming home) and peer at Ben over her battered copy of _To Kill A Mockingbird._

He smiled at her, occasionally, over the white picket fence that separated their yards - she used to tell him that, 'It's hot,' even though Emily knows that she'd sit out here during the ice age if it meant she got to see Ben's face. She always wondered why he mowed the lawn so much; he must need the money, she decides, even though he always bought two lunches - one for Emily, and one for Alison - and when Ali had gone goes to protest, Ben had told her that money's not a problem for him.

.

Emily's sixteen years old now and she still comes from a conservative Christian family, but;

When she was a kid, she would kneel in front of a priest and pray to God to make her beautiful. Now, she kneels in front of a toilet bowl and sticks her fingers down her throat, because she's learned if you want something doing you do it your goddamn self. (There is no god in this twisted, twisted world where her friends are killed before her, one by one, and she's forced to watch, the memories of their deaths imprinted upon the back of her eyelids). Every night, Emily swallows legal poison, bitter on her tongue and fire on her throat, and drinks away her memories. Every morning, she goes into the bathroom and throws up any illusion she ever had that things were going to be okay. Every afternoon, she cries until her eyes are dry, so at night, she can begin again.

She feels like each day is like walking through the woods — she's picking berries, squeezing them between her teeth, juice on her tongue and possibility on her palms, and Emily doesn't know whether this particular berry on this particular day will be poisonous or not poisonous or anything at all. She just has to continue into the wild, hoping one day everything is going to be okay. (But it's not, and Emily thinks that A and the deaths of Spencer and Toby - at least they died together, flying away into the sunset - and Aria and Mike and Hanna and Mrs. Marin, shouldn't affect her this much, but they kill her).

Her cheeks grow red with welts, pinch marks and blisters throughout the palm and delicate front of her hand, which grows paler, displaying more and more nerves by the day. She's wound up spinning herself into protective cocoons, because she's just so _freaking _afraid of everything and everyone because she's been hurt and if she even puts her walls up for one minute, the walls are going to come crashing down around her and she'll trap herself into holes, falling down into self-insecurities and hopelessness.

For the first time in sixteen years, Emily has moments in which she has what her highly exuberant, possibly a psycho, power-drunk therapist (because gay people need therapists to fix them) calls a 'mistake' — she feels the knife plunging into her neck, instead; she feels it slice through her rotten flesh, her bitter blood drip-drip-dripping. She falls, her spinal cord severed, and she can't move and Emily thinks this is probably best because at least now, her traitor hands can't hurt people with hearts that deserve to beat (sometimes, she wakes up in the night, heart jackhammering away, face sweaty and hair torn into shreds).

Emily blinks, and someone is helping the god-sent wrongly named victor to her feet; there is a time, where she releases herself from the swimming pool, pushing up like a victor who won a nationals competition should be feeling, ecstatic, but she feels numb, almost. Her body goes numb, and she falls limp, towards the cemented deck, and watches a drop of blood fall from her pale forehead; Emily vaguely remembers someone checking her pulse, and she knows they're lying when they tell him her pulse sounds normal. She doesn't have a heart to beat — her entire life is a mistake, she knows.

(Sometimes, she feels like her entire life is a mistake - the worst one that her parents could have possibly made.) For the next two years, she slips a golden band on her finger as she commits his life to the boy (because Ben, no matter how her parents tell her, will never be a man) she (does not) love. He wanted to get married, and she wants to be a normal, non-gay child, and she figured a commitment of life doesn't mean much when the person doesn't have a life to commit to begin with.

When Emily wears the band and laughs at Ben's bad jokes - as if she still cares - she looks down and her hands are clean. But when she takes the band off and Ben's bad jokes become awkward silences, there's a crimson ache that resonates across her palms that she just can't seem wash off.

(Ben's washed-out jeans are purposefully ripped, and Emily wonders why his mother doesn't sew them up. Six months later, she walks into his bedroom to find him with a razor blade between yellowed fingertips and remnants of sanity between burnt teeth. Twelve months later, Emily walks into his bedroom and doesn't find, not at all. Some things, Emily realize, can't be sewn.)

For the next month or so, she is left with nothing but the blood on her hands and his so-called mistakes and the remains of her sanity. At the end, she feels the knife plunge into her neck and this time Emily's therapist doesn't call it a 'mistake', he calls it a 'tragedy' — as does the rest of the brain-dead, puppet-on-strings town of Roseville, and their twisted, twisted population — and Emily thinks the only tragedy is that she was allowed to live this long.

Before releasing, there are moments that come back to Emily — she had a baby, a living, human child, and Emily will never seen Violet again (all she knows is the faint traces of strawberry blond hair and her adoptive parents who live in Pennyslvania, but she doesn't think that she's going to ever be the same again).

In death, Satan feels her pulse, his touch burning redemption into Emily's long-gone soul, and tells her it's not okay, and Emily hopes the phrase _the truth will set you free_ isn't another lie. (She knows it isn't. Emily's finally free from that hell.)

**notes | **this is inspired by the song 'hands of time' by rachel diggs, which was in the pilot of pretty little liars, (: hope you guys like this! this is for the coppertone wars' twelve days of christmas challenge, level five, part one which states - 'alternative: write **five **stories about alison's group/clique, one story about each each member. (alison, aria, emily, hanna, spencer)' so this is emily's part.


End file.
